Why Should Immigrants Show Good Attitude and Gratitude for America?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns immigration. Illegal immigration should be non-existent, and legal immigration should lead to the betterment of America. According to Victor Davis Hanson, discussion about immigration should include the attitude of the immigrant towards America and their expression of appreciation or gratitude for the opportunity to come. Attitude and gratitude for the opportunity to immigrate can be shown in obedience to the laws of the land or actually expression of love for America. 

In his article published at The Daily Signal, Hanson explains how the above can be shown in a variety of context. In California, more than 17,000 illegal immigrants received licenses to drive, which led to “a lot of drunk driving incidents and violence” and murders by people who crossed the border illegally. Other areas had college students from the Middle East showing “support for Hamas, Hezbollah, antisemitic sloganeering.” In Minnesota, “the Somali community got a billion dollars or multibillion-dollar grants … supposedly to supply food and meals….”

There were a variety of state and local laws that were violated, but there were no prosecutions….

But this opened a larger question. If you were an immigrant and you came to the United States from a war-torn, impoverished, and dangerous place, like Somalia, shouldn’t you express gratitude?

Ilhan Omar came here, to take one example…. She came here at 13 and she was given every benefit of being a U.S. resident and then a U.S. citizen. She was given a generous scholarship to go to college. She was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives. She was elected to Congress. I think she’s a four-term congresswoman.

She insisted, even though she was an American citizen, to wear the traditional Somali hijab, even though there was a rule in the House, an old rule, that people don’t wear headwear or gear or hats inside the Capitol chambers when Congress is in session. They made a special exception just for her.

But I mention this because she has a long line of indiscretions, and they form a pattern.

She said that the United States was a trashy country. She said that the dictatorship in America, i.e., the Trump administration, was not much different from the one that she left in Somalia. She said that Charlie Kirk, right after his death, was a scholastic terrorist….

She also said that it’s the Benjamins, baby, when she was making the argument that, as she put it, we in the Congress don’t have to have an allegiance to a foreign country and implying that Jewish members put Israel ahead of the United States.

And so, she’s been part of “the squad” and she’s had to apologize for some of her antisemitic rhetoric. She’s expressed overt criticism of the country that befriended her and allowed her to be educated at mostly at public cost, to be a representative of Congress, to write a book with a major New York publisher.

She’s also, she put on one of her financial disclosures that she almost had a zero net worth. Now, after her marriage to Tim Mynett … she now says that … their net worth may be as great as $30 million.

There’s also an accusation that, allegedly, allegedly, that she may have formalistically married her brother to ease his citizenship application, and then that marriage was legal and then it was dissolved as she married again….

My point is that, in this greater discussion about the fraud that goes on in Minnesota and our worry about immigrants on campus, behind the wheel of a semi-truck, administering a fraudulent food program, coming across the southern border, and then committing acts of violence, maybe, just maybe, we should ask of our immigrants a little gratitude….

And in this whole nexus, Ilhan Omar stands out as a person for two reasons. As an immigrant example, this country has lavished no more benefits on anyone than her….

And now she’s mysteriously a multimillionaire. And we still don’t know how the entire story of how citizenship was attained, from her brother….

And so, Ilhan Omar is an example of what’s wrong with legal and illegal immigration, that we allow people from countries that are … “Third World,” but are in chaos, in tumult, they come as refugees, they’re extended every benefit, and very soon they realize that their advance or their success politically hinges on the degree to which they express themselves as victims or as hard leftist or as ingrates. And she’s done all of that.